Maybe random conversations about race can't be meaningful. Maybe we can't expect relative strangers in a busy coffee shop to connect over the subject. But I tire of all the reasons we can't make progress on this issue. People don't want to talk about race, period, not with strangers, not with friends, not over dinner. It's as if we won't acknowledge it.

We must make this country a nation of equal protection under the law with equal opportunity for everyone. If we truly would like to be post-racial one day, we cannot continue to live in denial, or turn a blind eye towards reality, or remain complacent today. It's as simple as that.

In order to stop public shaming, we should all be held accountable and be role models to our children, our peers and others. Lead by example and show words of kindness can and do make a world of difference.

The challenge in addressing race relations in America has always been struggling to find the right place and time. In order to effectively embark upon that journey, police may need to be their own first respondents in addressing race and ethnicity within their own communities.

The national holiday celebrating Dr. King's birthday is over, but I hope we will heed and act on his 1967 declaration and work to win the first victory right here at home in the biggest economy on earth and end the shame of 14.7 million children being the poorest Americans by ending child poverty now.

Why does Chief J. Scott Dennis believe it to be good policy and practice to further target (literally and figuratively) people who have paid for their past mistakes? Does he think his policy has no real impact on the loved ones of those whose pictures his officers blast away?

Singling out American Muslims for blanket surveillance does not make our nation safer. Spying based on race, ethnicity or religion has failed to identify criminal activity while undermining the very trust between American Muslims and law enforcement that is needed to fight real threats.

As they enlarge the blanket scrutiny of Muslims without individualized suspicion, French law enforcement is more likely to waste resources investigating innocent people. Meanwhile, the guilty have more opportunity to plot undetected.

Perhaps the best thing about Justice While Black, by Robbin Shipp and Nick Chiles, is the way that it puts individual faces on the persons, disproportionately African-American males, who are systematically abused by the criminal justice system.

The pain of Dominika Stanley over the senseless loss of her baby girl, Aiyana, is unimaginable. Hard to suffer, too, is the crushing weight of isolation and alienation as the world responds to tragedies like that of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown Jr., and Eric Garner to the exclusion of the loss of black women's and girls' lives.

While grading term papers in the undergraduate course I teach at USF, "From Slavery to Obama," I found myself watching the televised funeral of one the NYPD officers recently assassinated by an apparently deranged African-American man. The coincidence prompted me to reflect on the moral and political challenges confronting our nation as we commence the new year of 2015.

On December 27th, as post-Christmas shoppers crowded The Grove shopping center, the streets around it in The Miracle Mile of Los Angeles closed down for something entirely uncommercial: A peaceful protest against the police brutality across our nation.

A couple of months before Tamir Rice died with an Airsoft gun in his hand, I stopped my son and a black friend as they were headed out our back door to meet a classmate at the park, loaded down with Nerf guns.